Conventionally, a querying user submits a search query containing one or more search terms to a search engine. The search terms are matched against terms in an index of web content and a list of results is generated based at least in part on how well the content of particular web pages match the search terms by the search engine. Web pages returned by the search engine are usually retrieved from the World Wide Web by web crawlers. In response to a search request, the search engine returns result sets in an ordered listing. The reliability of search results often depends on various factors, including the collection of the information, processing of the information, the information source and user feedback on the veracity of this information.
Problems can arise when there is a dramatic increase in activity for a particular search trend because of problems with not only determining the right contemporaneous information, but also the reliability of this information. Standard search terms can be easily and readily handled using existing search technology, for example a user conducting a search to find information on a vacation to Las Vegas.
A dramatic increase in activity typically represents a corresponding real world occurrence and users seeking out information of this real world occurrence in a time-sensitive manner. For example, suppose a natural disaster occurs or a rumor emerges that a company is about to launch a ground-breaking new product, there will be a corresponding increase in people searching for this information.
Current web searching technology suffers from an ability to successfully account for contemporaneous information. There is a growing trend for highly contemporaneous information achieving a critical mass of distribution in a very short time frame. This increase in contemporaneous information is predicated on the wide use and quick dissemination of information occurring in the current electronic world.
The conversion of the Internet from a passive online informational source to a de facto medium for information distribution, combined with the new tools for increases in contemporaneous content generation, complicates existing web searching technology. Examples of contemporaneous information may include data feeds, such as social media feeds, really simple syndication (RSS) feeds, web logs, etc. Prior techniques of crawling the Internet, cataloging and then searching these corpora suffer from a lack of proper accounting for these contemporaneous data sources.
With developments in search engine technology to account for these feeds, problems can arise in the reliability of this information. For example, just because a search engine may describe a social media feed that includes information relating to the event, there is no way to trust the source of this feed. Therefore, there exists a need for improving search results correlating to real-time information searches by accounting for expert weighting of sources in the search result.